The most important feature of Windows 7 is not being named "Vista". That alone generated millions of sales.

That's precisely how Apple's cat names started, until rumor sites caught wind and end users started using them. Then starting with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", Apple's marketing team decided to just run with it.

Personally I'm really disappointed that Ubuntu didn't go with Hungry Hippo.

Also, the reason people had fewer compatibility problems with 7 isn't because Microsoft fixed the OS, it's because software and hardware vendors fixed their applications and drivers.

If you tried to do anything useful on Windows Vista within the first six months after it was released, you probably had a miserable experience. If you tried to do the same stuff on Windows 7 within the first six months of that OS's release, it probably worked fine. What people don't realize is that if you did a clean install of Vista when Windows 7 was released, it would have worked fine too, because the apps had been fixed by then.

I don't buy that. It may have appeared up, but that's because everything was intermittent all day.

An iPad can ALSO be a tool, but it's a different tool that is great at different things. To borrow another poster's analogy, a kitchen knife is a great tool, but I'm not gonna use one for eating soup. Conversely, slicing a ham with a spoon is probably about as much fun as writing a paper on an iPad.

Or affix it to the laptop with a piece of tape, so you wouldn't have to worry about not being able to get your work done in case you forget your wallet or your keys. :-D

That is a fantastic analogy. Thank you.

(I'm pro-life, but strongly oppose any anti-abortion law that doesn't make exceptions for the health of the mother. In principle I don't support exceptions for rape and incest, but it irritates me when other pro-lifers refuse to compromise on this.)

If it takes 10,000 years, what's the point of sending people? 10,000 years is longer than the whole of recorded human civilization; even assuming you could keep the crew alive in hibernation for that long (I'm quite sure you can't), what would they do when they got there? They'd have the rusty tub they came in, and... nothing. If they managed to land safely on a planet that happened to have a breathable atmosphere and all the natural resources necessary to build a successful colony, I suppose it's possible they could succeed, but how would we even find such a suitable destination for them? Far more likely that they'd land on a frozen rock and be confined to the ship until they either suffocated or starved to death.

Unless, of course, during that 10,000 years our technology and understanding of the universe advanced to the point where we figure out how to do FTL travel in some way, so when the colonists finally arrive, we're already there to welcome them.

Let's see if we can send a few unmanned probes to other solar systems before we try it with people, shall we? At this point we can't even do that.

How do you know?

When you compare the original SMB to SMB3, there are tons of new things that affect gameplay:

• Improved physics for better control while jumping
• The ability to scroll left, letting you go back over areas of the map you've already passed
• The raccoon leaf, allowing Mario to fly (and to break bricks he can't punch from below)
• P-blocks, temporarily transforming coins into bricks and vice-versa
• Tons of new enemies that behave in very different ways, like ghosts and chain chomps and thwomps and the jumpy brick things and the guys that throw wrenches in World 8
• Different worlds with their own unique elements like double-size enemies or ice that's slippery to walk on
• Overworld maps, allowing you to see your progress and occasionally skip difficult levels
• The ability to collect power-ups that can be used before starting a new level
• A new approach to 2-player games: a level completed by one player is completed for both

SMB3 was revolutionary and creative. SMW built upon this by adding Yoshi, the ability to replay levels that had already been completed, and technical enhancements like stereo sound and higher resolution graphics and background graphics that scroll with perspective. From a gameplay perspective, it was evolutionary, not revolutionary. A great sequel, full of all the things that made the previous game great, but nothing felt like "oh, we're doing this again".

I haven't played most of the recent games, but it sounds like they need to look back to the creativity of the new elements that SMB3 introduced, and apply the same kind of creativity (not the same elements!) to the next Mario game. SMB3 and SMW were technological leaps forward from their predecessors, but we're long past the point where technological improvements matter to a Mario game.

Apple doesn't make a lot of money on its services, which mostly exist to add value to Apple's hardware. I'm not saying they're not making any money at all, but if they shut down iCloud completely, the biggest impact to Apple's bottom line would not be from the loss of subscription fees but rather from reduced hardware sales because consumers would find Macs and iPhones less attractive without it.

I think it's important to draw a distinction here between music and videos. Videos sold through the iTunes Store are encrypted with proprietary DRM technology making them unplayable on non-Apple devices, but that hasn't been true of music in many years. Virtually any modern media player should be able to play music purchased from the iTunes Store, and moving it from a Mac to a Linux box isn't any more complicated than moving it to another Mac (unless you use the feature in the new Mac's setup wizard to automatically copy everything from your old Mac).

You're forgetting a couple of very important details. Apple tried to fix the under-the-hood stuff, including preemptive multitasking, but just couldn't pull it off. Classic Mac OS was a pretty decent code base for what it did, but they needed it to do things it was never designed for, and the project to revamp it (code-named "Copland") was a failure.

After scrapping the Copland project, Apple realized that classic Mac OS was a dead end, and they started shopping around for other operating systems they could buy. They were looking seriously at Be before settling on NeXT. Along with NeXT came Steve Jobs, who took over the company, replaced the board of directors, created the iMac, bought iTunes, created the iPod, borrowed KHTML to develop WebKit, etc. etc.

My understanding is that no, Britain cannot legally do that.

What Britain apparently CAN do is declare that the Ecuadorian embassy in London is no longer being used for diplomatic purposes, and therefore is no longer considered to be sovereign territory of Ecuador. This has diplomats all over the world freaking out, because it would set a very scary precedent.

What Britain SHOULD do is shut the hell up and sit on their hands. As long as Assange remains inside the embassy, he's off limits. The moment he leaves, he is subject to arrest, but not until then. Of course he can only stay as long as the folks in Quito decide they'd like him to remain their guest...

Yes, but Microsoft's marketing department had absolutely nothing to do with any of that. Vista is terrible because the engineers were incompetent, not because the marketing department smoked too much weed.

I don't think Vista belongs in that category. It seems to me that the driving force behind Vista was always from the engineers - they just weren't very good.